Bambert is a recluse. He feels out of place in the world and lives in the top of his house, while the grocer downstairs, Mr Bloom, supplies all the provisions he needs. Bambert has completed ten stories for his Book of Wishes, and one day decides the stories should go and seek their own settings. Parcelling up each one, and sending it out into the world attached to Japanese hot-air balloon powered by nightlights, Bambert also includes an eleventh story, consisting only of four sheets of blank paper, which he hopes will write themselves. As the stories begin to return, with foreign stamps and the names of people who have found them, Bambert begins to reassemble his Book of Wishes, now filled with tales from around the world. There is, for example, a rather sinister tale about waxworks from England, the tale of a boy whose drawings come true, and a miraculous escape from a dungeon in Tsarist Russia. One night, Bambert finds the eleventh story. It did not fly anywhere, but stuck to his roof. Bambert falls to his death while trying to reach it, and never knows that Mr Bloom faked all the envelopes from his stamp collection.
Saddened when his friend dies, Mr Bloom rescues the eleventh envelope and writes the last story, about Bambert's arrival on 'the other side of the dream', where he's reunited with all the characters he brought to life.
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Reinhardt Jung was born in Germany in 1949. He worked with an international children's organisation before becoming head of children's broadcasting in Stuttgart in 1992. He died in 1999. Anthea Bell has worked as a translator for many years, primarily from German and French. She has received a number of prizes and awards for her translation work. She lives i
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